SHE. Is irrevocable!
(_Her foot is on the step of the stile. Her right hand holds the
poppies and supports the open sunshade which rests on her
shoulder. She turns her back on him._)
HE (_in a huff_). Oh, very well.
(_He commences walking towards the road gate. She half mounts
the stile, looks across the field, then pauses. He, some yards
off, is fumbling with the chain of the gate._)
SHE (_after making another movement towards the field and then shrinking
back_). Frank!
(_He does not hear._)
SHE (_louder_). Frank!
HE (_not moving_). Yes.
SHE. Come here.
(_He obeys. She remains seated on the top rung of the stile._)
SHE. Frank!
HE (_by the side of her_). Well?
SHE (_in rather an anxious voice, and pointing across the field_).
What's that?
HE. A bull.
SHE. Oh!
HE. Well?
SHE. Frank, are you sure you didn't mean to laugh at me?
HE. Quite sure.
SHE. You apologise?
HE. As much as you like.
SHE. And you'll never oppose woman's independence?
HE. Never!
SHE. Then you may carry my poppies for me.
HE. And come home with you?
SHE. If you promise not to tease.
HE (_leaping over the stile_). I promise.
SHE (_following leisurely and glancing warily across the field_). And,
Frank, dear, hadn't you better cover the poppies with your
handkerchief----
HE. Why?
SHE. Oh, because--isn't it rather glary in the field? They might fade,
you know.
On the Eve of the Regatta.
"'Why dost thou look so pale, my love?'
'I hear the raven, not the dove,
And for the marriage peal, a knell.'"
"A year to-morrow since our wedding day."
He lounged opposite to her in a Canadian canoe, now talking, now
soliloquising. Her eyes were closed, the fine pallor of her face, the
steely lights of her dusky hair showed contrastingly against cushions of
amber silk which propped her head. Grey was the background and
green--grey with falling gauzes of twilight, green with luxuriance of
leafage in its emerald prime.
They had paddled to Shiplake at set of sun, starting from their
house-boat, moored in Henley Reach, to return through the shady
backwater, which coiled like a slumberous silver snake through the heart
of a mossy lane. Here they lingered under a languishing tree--a very
Narcissus pining over its own image in the water, and shedding subtle
resinous odours of gum and sap upon the mellow air--determined to enjoy
Nature in mood of most infinite peace. Time passed unheeded, and
silence, the euphonious silence of dual solitude, was only broken by the
casual twang of lute strings, or the sudden enunciation of a
half-modelled thought.
"A year to-morrow since our wedding day." His voice thrilled with love
and tenderness, its tone caressed her ears, though her eyes remained
closed.
"You have been happy, dearest?" he said, leaning forward and clasping
one of her warm, white hands.
"Very happy."
"And had all you anticipated?"
"All--more," she breathed, with opening eyelids, "you have been very
good, very generous to me."
"Good? Can selfishness be mistaken for goodness? You said you loved fine
dresses, it became my pleasure to choose you the finest in the
world--you longed for jewels, and it was my pride to search for gems to
match your beauty."
"I was very greedy--too greedy. I care less for such things now. Poverty
makes one worldly, selfish, mercenary; don't you think so? I was so
poor!--the very rustle of silk was music to my ears, and the lustre of
precious stones seemed to conjure majesty and beauty in a flash."
"And now you have nothing left to long for?" He bent over her hand and
kissed it, and the little canoe, like a fairy cockle, began suddenly to
shake and dip in the swell of an unusual tide.
"Nothing, dear," she answered him, while her eye scanned the waves that
had so strangely ruffled their nook. "I wonder if some launch is passing
to swell the river so?"
"Scarcely; that bend in the creek would save the wash from reaching us."
"But the water is agitated; look! it seems as though a high wind were
raking the face of it." She gazed curiously up, and then down the
backwater.
The trees were swaying with a soft unheard whisper of wind, and in the
deepest shadow companies of gnats were playing hide-and-seek with each
other. No sound but the hum of insect life reached them.
"It is strange," she went on, stretching her hand to the quaking water
and withdrawing suddenly from the chill touch of it, "very strange; it
looks as though the sleeping river had suddenly awoken."
"Dear little pottle of whims"--so he had christened her--"what new
romance will she weave?"
"Oh, there is nothing romantic about that. If it were grass, the 'uncut
hair of graves,' it would be different."
"Different! Is grass portentous? churchyard grass especially?"
"Every green blade of the earth must be 'churchyard grass' as you call
it. It all springs up from life that was." She plucked a tuft from the
bank as she spoke, and laid its moist blades in her lap.
"Then where's the omen?
"A silly one--an old Teutonic superstition. They believe that if the
second husband of a woman treads the grave of the first, the grass will
wave till the corpse awakes from its rest."
At this he chuckled joyously, her voice was so appropriately tragic.
"But here we've no second husbands, and no tombs; only a fanciful little
wife who has burst the bonds of the matter of fact."
"Was I so prosaic?" She stared at the dancing gnats and flicked at them
dreamily with her glove. "Ah, perhaps so--in the days when the pinch of
penury forced one to be tough and calculating. You could not imagine,
Harry, the fret of blue blood in starved veins. To be poor makes one
mean, grasping, heartless; once rich, we can become amiable, virtuous,
heroic even."
"And poetic, eh?" he said, flushing at the recollection of
transformations that his love and his wealth had wrought for Cinderella.
"Come, we must not forget the Lowthers' dinner, we're due there now."
With this he paddled out from their retreat, carefully--for the dusk was
closing round them--into the open river.
All along the banks a misty vapour, rising from the earth, twisted and
wreathed till it wrapped the tow-path in gloom. Deep shadows stretched
their quaint deformities fantastically across the wave, mingling
deceitfully with black clumps of tall reeds, into which the canoe
occasionally glided with a dangerous swish.
The distance from the backwater to the Reach was fortunately short.
Coloured lights from the numerous house-boats that were gathered in line
to view the morrow's regatta guided them, and from the merry laughter
which assailed their ears they learnt the geographical position of Sir
Eustace Lowther's floating fairyland, styled ironically "The Raft."
"We're famishing," roared someone from its balcony.
"So are we," came in duet from the canoe.
"Take care of the ice-box," called another voice from the gloom, as a
paddle hit some obstacle in the darkness.
"Fiz cooling," explained a guest, appreciatingly. "Your hand?"
Lady Rolleston gave it, and was escorted up the steps to the feasting
place.
It was set out with a studied view to polite vagabondage. Deftly
manoeuvred forks, two-pronged twigs mounted in silver, and clasp knives
with chased and monogrammed handles, garden lanterns in frames of
fretted iron, osier baskets bursting with an incongruous burden of river
flowers and hot-house fruits, champagne in old Bohemian mugs, ices to be
dug from crystal troughs with silver trowels, all these heterodoxies
accentuated the bizarrerie which made "The Raft" such an unique and
enviable lounging place.
Among the guests were three painters, a peer, a novelist, an actress of
note, and one or two women whose beauty was, if not classical, at least
effervescent and exhilarating. Merry talk prevailed as a matter of
course, and bets were freely exchanged on the prospects of the crews.
"I hope to-morrow won't be a pelting day like last year; it was
ghastly," said one of the belles to Sir Henry Rolleston.
"I didn't find it ghastly," he chuckled; "but then I wasn't at Henley.
It was my wedding day."
"Lucky is the bridegroom that the rain rains on seems to be your version
of the proverb," chirruped his companion.
"We've been lucky enough, sun or no sun," he said, looking across at his
wife, whose lovely face wore a decidedly bored expression.
She was being worried by the peer, who, on the
"if-you-want-a-thing-well-done-do-it-yourself" principle, was vaunting
his own attitude towards the agricultural question.
"I never had such a wretched time," went on the beauty, "we were moored
higher up last year, by the island, near where you are now. But it
wasn't all the rain, it was poor Kelly's accident--you knew him, Basil
Kelly? Drowned, poor fellow, in the dark--canoe washed ashore in the
morning."
"Hush," exclaimed Sir Harry, looking across the table and lowering his
voice. "I never knew the poor fellow, but my wife did; they were boy and
girl chums for years. He was master at the Grammar School near her, and
a capital oar."
"That's what I couldn't make out. Did you see what the papers said?"
"The papers were purposely kept from us. It was too deplorable a subject
to be mooted on our wedding day."
"Did she ever know?"
"Yes, later, and bore it very well. She was indignant at the suggestion
of suicide, but has never alluded to the subject since."
"Harry," called Lady Rolleston from the opposite side, "Sir Eustace
wants to know why you moored so far up?"
"Oh," he replied, "partly because I was a bit late and partly because
we're best out of the thick of it. I enjoy seeing the start almost as
much as the finish."
"We have the Club grounds to go to if we like," explained Lady
Rolleston, as they mounted to the balcony where the thrumming of guitars
had already commenced.
All the racing visitors were gathered in knots in the blue darkness;
companies of performers, niggers, German bands, and banjoists were
skimming along from house-boat to house-boat, making music to the guests
and indulging in mild badinage with each other. The moon peered out from
the heavens through a silvery haze, and one by one the timorous blinking
stars grew more audaciously golden as the night became darker.
On "The Raft" most of the company disposed themselves in groups, and
boisterously chorused the musical sentiments of a young man who had
boarded the boat to recite of love-making on modern methods. Lady
Rolleston, exhausted from the fatigue of entertaining the indefatigable
agriculturist, sat somewhat apart on a long cane chair. She fanned
herself, and from time to time applauded. It was a pleasure to
contemplate the boyish zest with which her husband led the roar. Song
after song followed, and then came a "breakdown" from a young "Middy,"
whose spirits were infectious. At last, when the rampage had almost
ceased, Harry Rolleston became aware of his wife's silence and exceeding
pallor.
"It's awfully late, we must be off, or we shall face daylight before we
know where we are."
Jovial farewells were exchanged, parting bets quoted, then the pair
descended into darkness.
The river was now almost deserted; its face like a black mirror giving
forth only exaggerated reflections of such illuminations as still glowed
along the length of the Reach. These, however, served well to steer by,
and they neared their own house-boat with little difficulty. Outside,
though the night was sultry, tiny breezes that came and went fanned the
skin like the breath of babes. Under the roof, however, not a whiff of
air could penetrate, and, within the room, the atmosphere seemed hot and
asphyxiating.
Maud Rolleston, as she threw off her gown, complained.
"The air here is stifling, I should like to sleep on deck."
"Impossible," her husband said, "you would have the sun routing you in
an hour or two."
"Then we must keep the door open. I don't suppose there are burglars
about."
"Burglars? I'd like to catch them--but damp--one can't fight that."
"It is too hot to be damp," she asserted, laying a hand on the frilled
pillows of her tiny bunk.
"But dangerous mists rise up from the river," he argued, warningly.
"I am not afraid of mists," she said, and in her long silk bedgown she
tripped to the outer door, opened it, and returned to fling herself in
abandonment of fatigue upon her tiny couch.
As accompaniment to her slumbers the lapping of the tide against the
house-boat steps made a soft, incessant music, while the swishing of
reeds by the river bank sighed a sweet response to the whispered
endearments of the wind. On the air still floated drowsily the sound of
strings from guitars, and the muffled echo of voices that sang in other
house-boats farther down the stream. Then by degrees, within the space
of an half-hour, came a greater hush--the hush of a sleeping world worn
out with laughter and laziness.
* * * * *
And Maud Rolleston, dreaming, grew paler under the moonbeams that peered
through the lace shroudings of the narrow window. She sighed sometimes
in her sleep, now and again lifting her head upon an elbow, as though to
look out on the expanse of water that purled almost silently to its
inevitable future. Her eyes were open, expressionless, but tearful. In
the crystal seemed a reflection of the water's suddenly ruffled surface
which the moon was dappling with points of silver....
By and by she put her feet to the ground, hesitatingly at first, and
then gliding through the open door, she stood on an old Moorish
prayer-carpet that covered the head of the steps. Two nautilus shells
holding their burden of giant mignonette shielded her from the air; but
it broke at times fragrantly from the scented forest of blossoms.
With a lily in her hand, backgrounded thus by stars and midnight, she
might have represented a virgin saint on a missal, but her arms were
bare and extended, and she seemed rather to be a prophetess, a sybil,
uttering invocation.